Feminism Isn’t Dead

Contrary to what a lot of Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) blogs, media sites, and other predominantly male groups that are supportive of MRA’s but don’t actually identify as MRA’s say, feminism isn’t dead. In fact, it’ll probably stick around for another 50 years at the very least. This might give you the impression that I am somehow on the side of feminism. I’m not. At least not in its current evolved form wherein much of its rhetoric is, well, nothing short of man bashing, on the one hand, and their paradoxical insistence that this is somehow about equality, on the other. Let me explain.

It took feminists roughly 50+ years to get to where they are at right now. And like relationships that suddenly end for whatever reason that has lasted for a very long time, common wisdom says that it’ll take just as long, if not longer, for you to get over that person. By extension, I believe that feminism, even though it is incredibly fragmented right now, and most of the laws governing relationships between a man and a woman in the western hemisphere have been changed to favor the average woman as well as creating a whole generation of people (the Millenial Generation) under their feminist values, it’s probably going to take just as much time, if not longer, to undue or reverse the damage that has been done. And this, of course, assumes that the backlash is big enough such that most of society will collectively shun feminism in its current form and perhaps return to its roots as it was originally intended in the first and second wave.

Now, I can’t say one way or the other if this guy, Ryan, aka MasculistFeminist, who wrote this article is an MRA but in any case, his articles are definitely supportive of them. Nevertheless, I think it bears repeating, if only briefly, that MRA’s are not bad people. MRA’s are simply a group of people responding to the injustices that they have experienced. That’s it. If you look at it this way, you can begin to understand that feminists aren’t that different from MRA’s. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin. On one side, there are the females who are fighting for the injustices that they’ve experienced as, well, females, and on the other, there are the males that are fighting for the injustices that they’ve experienced as, well, males.

So far as the article is concerned though, I must admit that, as an American born Chinese with a fairly traditional (and conservative) Chinese upbringing, I agree with most of what he says. The only parts where I disagreed with his article was the part about the Obama administration being feminist leaning and/or supportive of feminism and certain parts of his article where he unanimously lumped one group of feminists with another or equivocated one group’s verbal message for the other. Admittedly though, I think that these are fairly minor disagreements on my part. But I’m bringing up his article and linking it for all my readers here because I think it’s important to consider both sides, what they say, what they stand for, and attempt to find common ground. I think all individuals should be doing this with regards to any issue. That is, to think critically of these issues, consider the pro’s and con’s of each side, consider the effects it would have on each other on the personal level and society at large, and on the grand scheme of things, how it effects others on the global level, rather than accepting these issues and ideas on blind faith. Just because one group stands for a good cause doesn’t mean you should just accept whatever that comes out of their mouths at face value every single time without even so much as a second thought. Otherwise, we’ll run into another Nazi Germany brewing in our own neighborhood in no time at all. Nazi Germany only became that because they took their German nationalism too far. This is called “extremism.”

Extremism is found in every ideology. Every single one of them has extremists within their ranks. Feminism is no exception to this rule. The MRA’s are no exception to this rule. The Civil Rights movement was no exception to this rule. All the world religions were no exceptions to this rule. At some point in time, all of these ideologies have had extremists take over and they were only stopped when enough people have died or when catastrophic events occur regularly enough for people to “wake up” and realize that there’s something seriously wrong. Feminism is at this stage. They are at the point where “the water is boiling over and people are getting burned left and right” without discrimination. So no, feminism isn’t dead and not enough people have “woken up” yet but that number is growing and at an exponential rate. There’s no doubt about that but despite that being the case, we are not at that point where western society will collectively shun feminism and help get it back on track with its roots.